Serial killer thriller far-fetched but still gripping

Published: Sunday, June 01, 2008

ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS

"Black Out" (Crown Publishers. 368 pages. $23), by Lisa Unger: Anybody who has cracked open a mystery novel in the last 25 years knows by now there are two Floridas. There's the sunny, pastel-hued, happy Walt Disney Florida. And then there's the Florida teeming with lunatics in trailer parks and bodies in the saw grass.

The prophets of this dual vision have mined the territory with gusto over the years, among them Elmore Leonard, crime-reporter-turned-novelist Edna Buchanan and the high priest of Sunshine State-based wackiness, Carl Hiaasen.

So kudos to Lisa Unger for venturing onto such well-trod ground with a novel that takes an especially dark look at the state's underbelly. While "Black Out," her third book, doesn't always work - it's prone, near the end, to some cartoonish resolutions - it still boasts a largely gripping narrative and evocative, muscular prose.

"There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance," Annie Powers, the novel's heroine, observes early on. "Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life."

Annie is a woman with a murky past, the monstrous details of which emerge slowly, measured out like spent bullet casings periodically tossed along a dark road.

We know she has a different name now than in this past life. She has a sweet 4-year-old daughter named, oddly, Victory, and a supportive husband with a mysterious job in an undefined line of security work that requires him to disappear for long stretches of time.

Gradually, painfully, Annie fills in the blanks. She was somehow involved with a notorious serial killer whose death has been confirmed to her. Her father abandoned her. Her mother was a fragile madwoman.

Yet despite Herculean efforts to wall off those terrible chapters of her life, Annie's past returns to stalk her.